There's a master on/off switch, and next to it is a rubber stopper which hides a Micro-USB port.

The dust bin with the filter removed.

On the underside is a little edge brush.

It's attached magnetically, for easy replacement.

The brush guard and carpet brush removed.

The wheels are spring loaded, so then you pick the robot up, the wheel extends and the robot shuts off.

The wheel pressed down.

The charging dock.

The "virtual wall" is just a magnetic strip.

It's been about two months since I've vacuumed my house, and the floor has never been cleaner. That's because I haven't been doing it—a robot has. For the past two months we've had a Neato Botvac Connected rolling around the house, the latest robo vac in Neato's lineup. Like all Neato robots, this has a spinning LIDAR unit that maps out the house. In this new "Connected" version, it's got Wi-Fi and a smartphone app.

The household name in household robots is definitely iRobot's Roomba, a round robotic vacuum cleaner that popularised the idea of having a little bot clean up after you. The fundamentals of the Roomba haven't changed much since its introduction: it's a vacuum on motorised wheels with a bumper plate in the front. When the plate bumps into something, the robot knows it hit an obstacle and changes directions. Start a Roomba on floor and usually it will spiral outward until it hits a wall, try to feel out the perimeter of the room, and then ping pong all across the centre of the house in an attempt to cover the interior space.

Most Roombas can't "see." Its only window to the outside world is the little bumper plate—it feels its way around a space by running into stuff. Roomba will say it takes this limited information and runs it through an algorithm to be a little smarter than "randomly driving around," but to the human eye, there's little logic to where the little disk is driving.

Neato takes a different approach to navigation—it gives the robot sight. On top of the vacuum is a circular dome which houses a spinning LIDAR sensor. It works a lot like a scaled-down version of a Google self-driving car. The top-mounted LIDAR sensor spins around, it fires a laser in every direction, the laser light reflects back into a sensor, and this data allows the robot to map out your house. With 360 degree vision, the robot knows where it is and where it's been. It can ditch the blind zig-zag pattern of a Roomba and vacuum more like a person—in clean, orderly lines.

It wasn't until the Roomba 980 that Roomba finally gave their robots some kind of vision in the form of a low-res camera. The Roomba 980 is a whopping £900 though; the Botvac Connected is a full £350 cheaper at £550.

The basics

Using the Neato is relatively simple. There are two main buttons on the front—a "home" icon that cleans your whole house and a spot vacuum button that cleans a small area in front of the robot. For simplest use case, you just walk over, press the button, and go back to whatever you were doing. It's also sporting a tiny LCD and a few touch-sensitive buttons, where you can set an automatic schedule and mess around with the settings.

Charging happens pretty much automatically. The Neato has a dock which plugs into the wall and exposes two strips of metal. Corresponding strips of metal are on the back of the Neato, allowing the little robot to "plug itself in" by backing up to the dock. The Neato will dock itself whenever it is done cleaning, and if it runs out of power in the middle of a job, it can dock, charge up, and resume where it left off. The dock is a little taller than the robot, and judging by the big piece of infrared penetrable plastic on the front, there are some markers in the dock that let the Neato detect it.

The Neato will find its way into every room in your house, but if you want to keep it out of some areas, it comes with a thin, 1-inch-wide magnetic strip, which lays flat on the floor. Sensors on the robot will detect the strip and treat it as a wall. The magnetic strip isn't a great solution. The magnetic sensors in the Neato aren't at the very front of the device—it needs to run over the tape a bit to detect it—so if the tape isn't perfectly flat on the floor, the robot will just push it around. Sometimes it will even push it out of the way and vacuum the room anyway. The LIDAR system can't detect the strip, which means the Neato can only "see" the virtual wall it when it's right on top of it. Sometimes this leads to the bot coming back to check on the strip multiple times—it knows there's an opening, and it really wants to clean it.

It's a vacuum, so of course the device makes some noise, but it isn't extremely loud. There are two settings on our top-of-the-line Botvac—"Turbo" and "Eco," with the "Eco" option being a little quieter and having a longer run time. The big rectangular cutout on the top is the dust bin, which easily lifts out of the unit. Emptying it is a simple, mostly-clean matter of unhooking the dust filter and dumping the bin in the trash.

I've tried a few of these robot vacuums, and it's important to set expectations correctly. The Botvac—and really any robot vacuum—is not totally autonomous and will not clean your entire floor with zero human assistance. The Neato is really a robotic rotating carpet brush, and it'll handle all the duties that a carpet brush on a full size upright would handle. That means cleaning the vast majority of your floor. A full-size upright vacuum comes with a bunch of other attachment tools for the edges, corners, stairs, and other spaces where the carpet brush won't reach, and you shouldn't expect a robo vac to be able to tackle those jobs. What it will do is cover 95 percent of the vacuuming duties for you. Occasionally, you'll have to give the robot a helping hand by emptying the dirt bin, getting it unstuck, or covering that last five percent with an edge tool.

It's going to suck up all the things a normal upright vacuum would suck up, including a lot of stuff you would rather it not suck up. In the same way that running an upright vacuum over wire or sock is a bad idea, the Neato will also run those things over, suck them up, and get stuck. Before you press the "start" button, it's a good idea to do a quick survey of the floor and pick up anything the Neato might eat. If you have an electronics area with a huge mass of cables on the floor, it would be a good idea to get organized, and clean them up, which would help both the Neato and the floor's cleanliness.

When the vacuum does suck up something it can't deal with, it will halt vacuuming and start calling for help, which comes in the form of an occasional beep. Then you'll have to hunt down the room that it's in and remove whatever object it got stuck on. The first few days you'll quickly learn what is and isn't OK to be on the floor, and usually, the Neato can make a full pass of my home without getting held up on anything.

Over the two months I've used the Botvac and the past year that I've had an older Neato, it has saved me a ton of time. The more orderly cleaning path means it covers a floor area faster and more efficiently than a Roomba, so it can be fitted with a more powerful motor. And in some cases it does a better job than a person could—the ~4-inch height allows it to drive right under a couch or bed and nab the dust bunnies that are out of sight. Also, since the process is automated and I just have to press a button (or set a schedule), the floor get vacuumed a lot more often than it would if I had to get up and do it myself. Heck, my house is being vacuumed right now as I'm writing this article.

Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron.amadeo@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo